Aperture

Last Wednesday Apple presented a preview of a new photo software called Aperture, an application aimed at professional photographers which is supposed to be in stores in November. Aperture, according to Macworld magazine, is not going to compete with Adobe's Photoshop, but rather help the workflow of professional photojournalist. Apple programmers claim to have listened to demands from some of the most prominent names in the photo industry and implemented features from photographer's wish-list into this new application. Aperture imports digital images from the memory card and opens them in a browser, thus replacing popular image browsers, like PhotoMechanic. It has basic photo-manipulating features built in, like tone and color correction, cropping, sharpening, etc. It is built to work with raw camera formats, and the beauty is - it preserves the original file from the camera. All the changes photographer applies to a digital image Aperture stores on a separate "layer" within the file, not changing the original. The adjustments are applied only when the file is exported in some of the popular formats - jpeg, tiff, psd or others. There is no “Save” command – Aperture records the changes to the file continuously and allows us to undo certain steps at any time. It can export and import files to and from Photoshop. However, Macworld noticed that Aperture uses a lot of processor power – minimum requirement is, according to Macworld, 1.25GHz, while Apple recommends running it on 2GHz machines. It is, obviously, built for new generation new dual-core, dual-processor Power Mac G5